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Coupled with Trump’s desire for regional allies to do more to provide for their security is an explicit understanding he has that US military intervention in the Middle East has achieved little and comes at far too great a cost. “We’ve been fighting this war for 15 years,” he told "60 Minutes" Nov. 13. "We’ve spent $6 trillion in the Middle East, $6 trillion, we could have rebuilt our country twice.”

Recently, I attended the Third Annual Abu Dhabi Strategic Debate, where hundreds of regional Arab participants claimed that Iran is bent on regional hegemony and interferes in the affairs of Arab countries. Additionally, they blamed the United States for attacking Afghanistan and Iraq and handing the region to Iran. As the only Iranian at the conference, I reminded them that the US war on terror was triggered by the Sept. 11 attacks, which was carried out by 19 hijackers, 15 of whom were Saudis. Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was for years also a Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) ally, which supported him throughout the brutal eight-year Iran-Iraq War. Afterward, when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990, the GCC called on the United States and its allies to come to their rescue and push back Saddam. In the case of two other Arab countries — Libya and Yemen — that have collapsed in recent years, the GCC was directly involved in military strikes that destroyed the state in these countries. Trump’s line of thinking on these issues is in the right direction. To foster a more peaceful Persian Gulf, it is imperative for the United States and its allies to play a more assertive role in fostering regional stability and for America to abandon strategies centered on regime change and military intervention.

A CSCE-type process for the Persian Gulf — one which includes Iran, Iraq and the six states of the GCC — can be a way toward fostering a stable regional order. While much separates these states today, a gradual process that begins with their simply holding regular meetings where they can communicate their security grievances can result in more cooperative relationships' developing over time.

Haji Zadeh said 35 US bases were within reach of Iran's ballistic missiles, the most advanced of which commanders have said could hit targets 2,000 km (1,300 miles) away.

It was not clear where Haji Zadeh got his figures on US bases in the region. US military facilities in the Middle East are located in Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Turkey, and it has around 10 bases further afield in Afghanistan and Kyrgyzstan.

Defense analysts are often skeptical about what they describe as exaggerated military assertions by Iran and say the country's military capability would be no match for sophisticated US defense systems.

Nimrod Ben-Zeev of the YaLa-Young Leaders group says 18 members from Israel, the Palestinian territories, Tunisia, Algeria, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Iraq and Kuwait met in Berlin over the weekend.

the group was selected from the most active of YaLa's 162,000 Facebook members

the movement wants to empower Middle Eastern youths to work together to improve their communities. It plans an online university next year

"There was much to gain from making a highly visible stand against authoritarian misrule in North Africa, in Syria and in Yemen. Moreover, the opportunity cost of doing so was low at first as Qatari expressions of declaratory and material support for opposition movements elsewhere were unlikely to rebound domestically while they also played into Qatar's efforts to be taken seriously as a responsible participant on the regional and international stage." However, according to Ulrichsen, this strategy has started to unravel – partly because of Qatar's ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and partly because it is now viewed less as an impartial mediator and more as an activist and opportunist.

"In contrast with the gradual domestication of Brotherhood movements in Kuwait, in the UAE and to a lesser extent in Saudi Arabia where they developed local political groups, Qatar extended and diversified its ties with the regional branches of the movement outside Qatar while keeping a firm lid on any activities at home.  "While Qaradawi and others were given a platform on al-Jazeera, they and other Brotherhood exiles were accommodated in Doha on a tacit understanding that they would refrain from intervening in or commenting on social issues within Qatar itself, thereby establishing a clear distinction between the domestic and regional spheres of activity, and what activities were permissible and what were not."

"Above all, there's a danger that the lack of a coherent strategy in its foreign policy which is opportunistic, seizing opportunities as and when they arose, now makes Qatar susceptible to international and domestic sources of instability going against one of its main drivers of foreign policy – which was to maintain a network of security and stability." For these reasons, Ulrichsen expects Qatar to become more introspective under its new emir. 

Saudi Arabia hosted Arab Muslim Brotherhood exiles during the repression of the 1950 and 1960s. They came not only from Egypt but also from Syria, Iraq and other Arab countries where they had been prosecuted. Brotherhood cadres played a pivotal role in Saudi educational institutions and later the transnational organizations set up by King Faisal to counter the spread of Arab nationalism and leftist movements. Saudis used the exiled Islamists as tools to weaken such movements and undermine their credibility, while emphasizing their un-Islamic character. During the anti-Soviet jihad in the 1980s, Saudis used the worldwide networks established by the Brotherhood to inflame the imagination of its youth and channel aid and weapons. Yet Saudi Arabia never allowed the Brotherhood to establish branches there as they did in other Arab countries and in the West.

Educated urban Saudis were attracted to the Brotherhood discourse and impressed by its ability to form civil society organizations, posing as charitable and welfare services. Individuals frustrated with the Wahhabi-Salafist tradition that forbids political action and unconditionally obeys rulers, found in the Brotherhood an authentic discourse capable of mobilizing society. The ideological vacuum that resulted from the death of Arab nationalism and socialism after 1967 was quickly filled by political Islam. To counter the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Saudi religious establishment condemned it as a divisive force and accused it of undermining people’s creeds. Saudi Arabia began to curb the activities of the Brotherhood after the latter condemned the Saudis for inviting foreign troops to expel then-Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from Kuwait in 1990.

After 9/11, suspicion of the Brotherhood evolved into outright hostility. Prince Nayif accused the Brotherhood of radicalizing Saudi youth and held it responsible for the terrorism wave that swept the country from 2003 to 2008. Such accusations were unfounded, as most jihadis operating in Saudi Arabia grounded their actions in the teachings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the 18th-century preacher whose tradition has been dominant in Saudi Arabia up to the present.

Guest workers often live in villas that “vary from unfinished to decrepit,” several men to a bedroom, kitchen, or toilet, with inadequate sanitation on the outskirts of the urban centers. There are also laws that limit when and where they can take their weekend breaks, even to the point of barring them from certain public parks, beaches, and during certain times of the day – a restriction that Human Rights Watch says is primarily enforced against South Asians, and not Western or Arab expats. As Andrew Gardner and Autumn Watts – anthropologists studying transnational migration in the Gulf – these workers are Invisible Men and Women. They are the largest single demographic in some of these states, but are effectively unseen unless they gather in such numbers to inspire unease among full citizens: “Labor migrants are, of course, visible everywhere in the city — in large work crews, in matching uniforms, on the buses that carry them between labor camps and construction sites — but those encounters from a distance are the limits of typical interaction between them and the middle and upper classes of both foreigners and citizens who make a home, however temporary, on the peninsula.”

Qatar is even more heavily dependent on migrant workers than Saudi Arabia. 87% of the population consists of migrants, and 94% of the entire labor force is from overseas – which means that only 6% of the workforce, as native Qataris, can legally form a union or leave a job without their employer’s permission

One Saudi prince, a grandson of the kingdom’s founder, has stuck his head partly above the parapet with a letter calling for King Salman to go – and he appears to have support from others in the clan. The prince is also saying things that less-privileged Saudis might well wish to say, but can’t. His royal blood means he is less likely to be carted off to jail and flogged, but even he is wary of being identified by name.

Writing in the Lebanese Daily Star after a visit to Dubai, columnist Rami Khouri described a sense of alarm sweeping through the Gulf: “Seen from Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi, the world around the mostly wealthy oil-producing [Gulf Cooperation Council] states has been turned on its head in the last four years. Every major geo-strategic potential threat or fear that they have quietly harboured for years has started to materialise – virtually simultaneously.”

The kingdom can’t continue like this indefinitely and, increasingly, Saudis know it.

For decades, Saudi Arabia has served as the world's central banker of oil supplies. In unstable times, most famously in the wake of Iraqi's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, it has drawn from its spare production capacity of some 1 million barrels to bring prices to heel.

Iraq's revival as a prominent oil exporter is bound to reshuffle a careful power balance in the energy-rich Arab world, particularly between bitter rivals Saudi Arabia and Iran. Saddam Hussein's 2003 toppling created a vacuum that both sides rushed to fill, for example deploying proxy forces at the height of Iraq's sectarian civil war. OPEC is another battlefield for the Saudi-Iran rivalry, and the Saudi kingdom is in no hurry to lose its uncontested status as No. 1. Now, as Iraq stabilizes politically and slowly rebuilds its oil-production capacity, both sides will have to accommodate a more assertive Baghdad. Even if oil production doesn't reach the Iraqis' goal, it will likely be higher than the approximately 1.7 million barrels per day that Iraq was producing just prior to the U.S. invasion.

quota smashers like Iran and Venezuela, who routinely oversell to pay for their costly entitlement programs

Kuwait, a member of the Gulf Cooperation Council that tried unsuccessfully to broker a power transfer deal, said it had evacuated its diplomatic staff from Yemen. Qatar, another GCC member, has also suspended most operations there.

fighting last week that killed at least 115 people and pushed the country closer to civil war.

Yemen is on the brink of financial ruin, with about a third of its 23 million people facing chronic hunger.

No one shall be tried twice for the same offence.

No citizen shall be expelled from his country or prevented from returning thereto.

Free choice of work is guaranteed and forced labour is prohibited. Compelling a person to perform work under the terms of a court judgement shall not be deemed to constitute forced labour.

Syria’s ally, Hizbollah, managed to force the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and France to rethink their strategies for the new Middle East in summer 2006. First France, the US and their “moderate” Arab allies realized they might have to lower their expectations… the unsuccessful use of American and Israeli power (”shock and awe” style) in Iraq and Lebanon led to nothing more than an almost total disrespect for such arrogant use of force by the people in the region… Ask anyone today what he thinks of an Israel or American military conflict with Iran and he will answer you: “They would be crazy to attack Iran”

King Abdullah decided at the Kuwait summit that it is time for him to make a decision … So he opted to make peace with the young Syrian president, while a visibly surprised Hosni Mubarak was instead prepared to escalate his confrontation with Assad.

Syria and Turkey have just signed a high-level cooperation agreement in different fields